Firstly, @ottilie, I can't believe a real person exists named Martyn Crucefix, and that he's not a darkling underlord in some teen gothic thriller.

Seconding anything written by Neil Gaiman-- Good Omens is one of my favorite books ever, in that's it's a cracking good story that manages to delve into the occasional Big Idea.

- Umberto Eco, In the Name of the Rose
- PG Wodehouse (anything in the Jeeves & Wooster or Blandings Castle series)
- Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
- Eric Newby, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (a hilariously self-deprecating nonfiction adventure story)
- AndrewSoloman, Far From the Tree (nonfiction, fascinating account of how parents with special children-- from the profoundly developmentally delayed to geniuses-- deal with their genetic divergence)
- anything by Annie Proulx, from The Shipping News to her Wyoming short stories
- Peter Mathiessen, the Snow Leopard. An absolute classic for nature writing-- read this if you've ever wanted to pin down your sense of the sublime

- not yet read but high on the list: Rachel Kushner "the Flamethrowers." Just came out and regaled as the best novel of the decade

Ottilie - So cool you have a grad degree in classics....I hope you are putting it to much better use than I am my undergrad (now getting my master's in business, eegads!) I never learned italian sadly, but Dante's italian is pretty close to latin so luckily I got a lot from it.

I did my undergrad thesis on Sophocles' Antigone, which I also recommend reading, southern.maple! All the greek dramas are wonderful.